Arcane Topics in Economics and Philosophy, Interspersed with Various Distractions

July 27, 2009

Biden Gets It

Just weeks after a summit meeting intended to show a thawing in relations between the United States and Russia, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made blistering references to Russia’s failing economy, loss of face and a leadership that is “clinging to something in the past,” in an interview published on Saturday.

Speaking on the heels of his trip to Georgia and Ukraine, Mr. Biden said flatly that the Obama administration would make no deals and accept no compromises with the Kremlin in exchange for better relations.

Russia itself, he said, should find it in its own interest to repair relations.

The Kremlin immediately responded to the comments, made in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, with a demand for a clarification of the administration’s intentions toward Russia, saying essentially that it was receiving a mixed message so soon after President Obama had visited Moscow for the summit meeting.

Calling the criticism “perplexing” in light of the diplomatic overtures initiated by the United States and described as “pressing the reset button,” the chief foreign policy adviser to President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Interfax news agency, “The question is: who is shaping the U.S. foreign policy, the president or respectable members of his team?”

“If some members of Obama’s team and government do not like this atmosphere, why don’t they say so?” Interfax reported him as saying. “If they disagree with the course of their president, we just need to know this.”

In the interview, Mr. Biden set aside diplomatic finesse and offered an unflinching analysis of the state of affairs in Russia.

With falling oil prices, a corruption-ridden banking system and failing courts, Russia has seen the steepest swing from growth to recession of any major economy in the financial crisis.

Mr. Biden has a reputation for speaking volubly, and sometimes going beyond official policy. It was not immediately clear if he was sending an officially sanctioned message.

Well done! More talk like this from Biden could erase the damage from Obama's biggest foreign policy error so far, his trip to Moscow, with its cowardly, sinister, and strategically inept signal of appeasement (calling for a "reset" in relations when the deterioration of relations was wholly due to unprovoked Russian aggression in the south Caucasus). Biden is far better than Obama in foreign policy. Obama should recall that it was largely thanks to Biden that McCain's massively superior foreign policy experience was neutralized. In foreign affairs, November 2008 was as much Biden's victory as Obama's.

UPDATE: It is worth noting that even (to take a random example) the following comment by Obama during his Russia visit, seemingly a throwaway truism, isn't strategically sound at the present time:

"America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia," he told a large crowd at the New Economic School. "This belief is rooted in our respect for the Russian people, and a shared history between our nations that goes beyond competition."

The August 2008 invasion of Georgia showed the use to which Russian strength will be put, if the Putin regime and the paranoid nationalism that underlies it are not transformed. Prosperity in Russia only strengthens the regime and magnifies the menace that Russia poses to its neighbors and to world peace. It's not even quite true to say that "America wants," or that America should want, a "peaceful" Russia. Some kinds of turmoil and upheaval in Russia-- liberal protest movements like those that have recently taken place in Iran-- would be very good for America and the world (and the Russian people), and in a rather grim and roundabout way even violent separatist movements like those in Chechnya and Ingushetia may serve not only America's interests but those of mankind as a whole by helping to tie Russia's hands. A "strong" Russia in the only sense in which Russians can at the present time understand the phrase is bad for everyone concerned, not least the Russian people who take senseless pride in aggressive foreign adventures masked by lies that do no one any good. One has to stretch words a lot to think of any sense in which a strong Russia is a good thing. But at the moment even a prosperous Russia is not really something to be wished for. Every drop in Russian GDP, every uptick in unemployment, weakens the Putin regime within Russia and weakens Russia in the world, and makes Russia's long-suffering neighbors a little safer and world peace a little more secure. That has to be balanced against the harm to Russians, of course, but we should bear in mind that Russia is not really a poor country like India or Africa, or even China.

Only when Russia repudiates its Soviet past as Germany has repudiated its Nazi past can the world unambivalently wish well to the Russian economy. America can indeed respect the Russian people, just as a man may respect a talented and courageous friend who, however, has been driven by depression to alcoholism and beating his wife. Respect should take the form of an overriding insistence that Russia's regime and people mend their ways.